Sexual exploitation and abuse in
humanitarian crises is an area fraught with complexity. Don’t get me wrong, men
exploiting women is bad and must be addressed and punished. Yet take a moment
to consider the other side; women make fully informed decisions to be
“exploited”, revealing that they have weighed up their options and have decided
that entering the relationship is to their benefit. Who are we to say their
decision is wrong? I write this piece because I don’t know the answer.

The community elders were worried
about the number of pregnant women in the camp. Women should not have been
getting pregnant, since most of them were married – albeit to men who had been
in military detention for well over two years. A few years back, the Nigerian
military, embroiled in a fight with Islamist group Boko Haram, had arrested the
community’s military-age men, detaining them as possible collaborators. The
women had received no word of their husbands’ whereabouts – or if they were
even still alive.

So, the pregnancies should not
have been happening, the elders thought. Yet the growing ranks of pregnant
stomachs revealed that something was going on. They decided action must be
taken. A patrol was formed – a group of men, a camera – and sent out at night
to rove between tents, seeking to catch out misbehaviour.

Around midnight on a Saturday,
the patrol caught a pair “red handed”. They burst in, snapping photographs of a
woman, frantically covering herself with her wrap. Her lover sat beside her in
his shorts. They looked shocked by the late-night intrusion. When questioned,
they said they had been in a relationship for months, they loved each other and
wished to marry. The elders were angry that the couple had entered their
relationship without following procedures – seeking elders’ approval, informing
camp management – especially as the woman was technically still married. This
man worked on a sanitation project funded by an international humanitarian
organisation. It was for this reason that I was called in.

I work on north-east Nigeria’s
humanitarian response, a growing operation catering to an ever-worsening
crisis. I’m a gender violence specialist, hired to work on “sexual exploitation
and abuse”, a type of gender violence focused on the abuse of power by
humanitarians over their beneficiaries. We’d heard terrible things about levels
of exploitation in the camps; of men conducting food distributions and only
giving “tokens” to girls who’d allow them to “visit” at night; of areas of the
camp with few young women being altogether bypassed for assistance; of
teenagers snuck out of camps to nearby hotels to ‘service’ local men. Girls
traded sex for biscuits, milk, or a dollar or two – speaking to immense levels
of desperation. When cases of sexual exploitation by humanitarians are
reported, my role is to investigate and act on these.

My first reaction when briefed on
this case was irritation. With the shocking exploitation we know to be going
on, I was being asked to investigate a case that seemed to me to be two adults
having consensual sex – albeit sex that had angered the elders. I felt
uncomfortable travelling there, the foreign woman with the notepad, to ask
intrusive questions to an already humiliated woman. My job is to prevent abuse,
not to police sexual morality. Yet, my job is to take reports of exploitation
seriously, so off to the camp I went.

First, a note on how challenging
this is. While the camp is mere hours by road from Maiduguri, where the
humanitarian response is centred, it’s not just a matter of driving there.
Maiduguri, where Boko Haram hailed from, is under military control, with a
strong military presence allowing relative safety and movement. Yet, drive half
a kilometre out in any direction and its wild west – a land where Boko Haram
roams freely, where heavily armed military convoys come under frequent deadly
attack. A helicopter had to be booked and authorized days ahead, security
clearances attained, word sent out to those meeting me there, in a place with
no phone coverage – just some of the challenges in investigating abuse in
places so remote and inaccessible.

I recognised the woman from the
half-naked photo that had been taken by the patrol. She sat before me,
cross-legged on the floor, in a brightly coloured head scarf that stretched
from her head to her knees, revealing just the round of her face. A complicated
three-way translation ensued, with one man translating my English into Hausa,
the next translating it into her local dialect, awaiting her response, then
back again – not the way you want to be asking sensitive questions to an
embarrassed woman. I apologised for the personal questions, explained that we
were there trying to try help her, then proceeded with a line of carefully
worded, yet invasive questions about her relationship and her motivations for
being in it. Everything about this felt icky.

She told me that she had met the
man at the water pumps. He had helped her on a number of occasions – allowing
her to skip the queue, saving her hours of waiting. He promised he would buy
her food and clothes, which over the coming months he did. When I asked why she
became involved with him, she said it was because she and her children needed
assistance, which he could provide. They grew increasingly close, saw each
other every day and began discussing marriage.

After the patrol burst in, they
were forbidden from seeing each other again. I asked how she felt about their
relationship ending. She began to cry. She said: “I feel very bad, because
since then I do not receive any assistance from him. Now I have no one to
assist me.” She explained how badly women with no husbands struggle in the
camp. This is why she, like many, have relationships with NGO men – so they
might “stand up for them” and help them find what they need in the difficult
camps environs.

My discomfort was rising. Clearly
her stated motivations revealed an exchange – a relationship entered into for
humanitarian assistance – putting this squarely within the realm of sexual
exploitation and abuse. In the binary thinking of gender violence
practitioners, “violence=bad should be stopped”. Here, the “violence” in
question had been terminated, yet she sat before me sobbing at having had this
thing taken away, that she had worked so hard to get; that she so badly needed.
She ranted angrily about how unfair it was that she was being prevented from seeing
him. There was no semblance of a violated women grateful for being saved from
further violation.

Sexual exploitation and abuse in
humanitarian crises is an area fraught with complexity. Don’t get me wrong, men
exploiting women is bad and must be addressed and punished. Yet take a moment
to consider the other side; women make fully informed decisions to be
“exploited”, revealing that they have weighed up their options, considered the
implications of both doing or not doing, and have decided that entering the
relationship is to their benefit. Who are we to say their decision is wrong? In
terminating these unions, the women lose, and everyone feels worse for it. On
the other hand, exploitation is harmful and can have terrible consequences. I’m
not for a moment arguing it should be allowed.

I write this piece because I
don’t know the answer – to this case or others like it. While there are many
cases of exploitation that are obviously harmful, violent and wrong – others
present in shades of grey. I feel confused about my role and about how to fight
this grey “violence”. I hate it that I was called in because the authorities
were upset about sexual practices they perceived as violating traditions – and
that in labelling something “sexual exploitation”, they got a quick
international response. I hate the fact that this seemingly consensual, even
loving relationship did turn out to have exploitative or transactionary
underpinnings. I hate the fact that us putting an end to this “exploitation”,
left the “victim” even more vulnerable and devastated – and that in her eyes,
the harm had actually been committed by us, who had stopped her. I can’t think
of another area of gender violence programming that has left me so unsettled,
so unsure about what we are doing, so unclear of right or wrong.

Humanitarian crises turn mores
and judgements on their heads. I sit here in north-east Nigeria, not at all
sure what I achieved this week – whether I helped, or whether, as the tears
running down the woman’s face suggest, we collectively may have done more harm
than good. DM

Dr Orly Stern (@orlystern) works
as a researcher, consultant and international lawyer, focusing on armed
conflict, gender, security and law. She has worked and researched in several
countries including Iraq, South Sudan, northern Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Central
African Republic, Jordan, Uganda and South Africa. She has consulted for
various international organisations, research institutions and NGOs, and has
published extensively in her field. Orly is a senior fellow with the Harvard
Humanitarian Initiative. She holds a PhD in law from the London School of
Economics and a Masters in human rights law from Harvard University

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